Power Dynamics, ‘Strategery,’ and Charlottesville

September 15, 2017

Some guy named Michael Perilloux has written another strategery essay which once again attempts to apply corporate marketing and mainstream political strategy lessons to our struggle. It’s entitled, “Lessons From Charlottesville In Power Dynamics And Strategy.” In it, he explains that Charlottesville had a negative impact because it provoked a hostile response from the state.

By now, you’ve seen the chaos that unfolded in Charlottesville on August 12 and the resulting unprecedented crackdown on virtually anything publicly right-wing.

Supposedly the torchlight parade was the highlight of the weekend.

Serious onlookers were presented with a crack in the matrix: alt-righters peacefully and aesthetically saying “you will not replace us,” and everyone else calling them evil Nazis. One could imagine serious, open minded people saying: “Now wait a minute, maybe I should look closer,” though granted the chant “Jews will not replace us” likely didn’t help the event.

Then TradWorker and friends ruined it with our terrible aesthetics.

Even without the chaos, the image was more dominated by unsavory characters: ill-shapen schlubby goons with Nazi flags and makeshift weapons, in addition to infamous old-school white nationalist movement figures with mile-long records of scamming, degenerate behavior, and dishonesty.

There was only one unaffiliated swastika guy at the entire event. But to hear the opticians tell it, he singlehandedly ruined everything. How that guy ruined everything but the torch-wielding mob chanting “Jews will not replace us” was merely less than helpful is an exercise in blame-shifting from a man who’s clearly partial to one faction and hostile to another. He doesn’t reference what scamming, degenerate behavior, or dishonesty is actually afoot, just insists that all of the degeneracy was with the groups who were fighting in the event but not in the march.

What’s presented as this sensible objective analysis of strategery and optics for our movement’s tactically-minded lay reader is a not-so-subtle attempt to declare the event a failure and blame the national socialists and southern nationalists for that alleged failure. Not a single one of us brought a swastika. Our uniforms were all to spec. We won the fighting. And to my knowledge none of us are scammers, degenerates, or “dishonest.”

Many organizations associated in any way with the alt-right (and a few with no apparent connection) have had parts of their infrastructure unplugged from major internet service providers, in an utterly unprecedented crackdown. All major news outlets had wall-to-wall coverage against “white supremacists” for weeks. Historic statues in other cities were vandalized and removed. VICE proposed blowing up Mount Rushmore.

Is there some way to escalate, to advance, to increase our profile, without increasing the mainstream media slander, lawfare, and censorship tactics? There’s not. If we’re not catching flak, we’re not over the target. A situation where we’re safely contained and ignored, where the oligarchs feel no pressure to try to stop us, is what we’ve experienced for decades leading up to our escalation, and it’s because we presented no threat of seizing the populist momentum.

The Saturday Charlottesville chaos gave the media all the material they needed to paint a picture of alt-right = idiot Nazis = violence and terror = bad. It doesn’t matter who started it, how two-sided the fighting was, how evil the leftists are, how reasonable the “you will not replace us” demand was, or how small, in the scheme of things, the death of one protester is.

This is your brain on corporate marketing theory.

As one thumbs through one’s marketing textbook while rounding out one’s undergraduate curriculum, one learns that persuasion is all about subtle incremental signaling and optical cues which gently influence which shampoo a man purchases. When you see those terms: persuasion, signal, optical, and influence, these are the politics of persuasion. If you’re not trying to convince a man to switch shampoo brands–but to shave his head altogether–then you’re dealing with the politics of conversion. In the politics of conversion, the operative terms are: conversion, doctrine, vision, and strength.

We categorically cannot and will not win by convincing the masses that we’re merely another brand of political discourse within the Overton Window of acceptable opinion. We’re a radical (radix, root) alternative. We do not seek a seat at the table, but to flip the table over altogether. Those pursuing the persuasion strategy will always find themselves falling on one side or the other of their futile tightrope act; either signaling for and supporting the system in order to fit in or being unmasked, discredited, and left iced out of mainstream political discourse. Quite often, as with the John Birch Society, it’s the worst of both worlds, loudly opposing racism and antisemitism while being locked out on account of racism and antisemitism.

This is beta, and to borrow from “game,” it’s a failure to seize control of the frame.

We will win by presenting a starkly different vision and confirming that we’re strong enough to deliver on that vision. What truly mattered in Charlottesville is that we turned up in impressive numbers and that it was the state and not the antifa who chased us from our venue. The fact that South Park and MSNBC insist that we’re unsavory is beside the point. What matters is that we successfully qualified ourselves as the faction tough enough to resist the Antifa, BLM, and leftist radicals on the streets.

What we can’t do is force the timeline. We can’t become so homoerotic, so devoid of rough men with the wrong haircut, that the people will turn to us. They’re not turning away from us because we’re not sexy enough. They’re turning away from us because they’re not motivated enough just yet to solve the problem. The election of Trump, the growth in our ranks, and the general atmosphere all suggest that things are moving in that direction. But the last thing we need to do right now is disunite and bicker over optics, …weakening us all and reducing our capacity to similarly succeed in future confrontations.

The rally coalition in question was a big tent. There was no control over who was there representing the alt-right, so plenty of unsavory characters showed up to embarass the rest. The chaos tended to involve these fringe members of the coalition.

Read that last sentence, directly implying that the men holding the line in the worst of the fighting are actually at fault for ruining it for all of the guys who didn’t happen to be fighting. The fact that the national socialists were on the front lines in the successful battle condemns us somehow.

We can see that it was these edge-cases that the media is exploiting the most in their narrative about “Nazis and KKK.”

There wasn’t a single klan robe in the entire rally, but Michael never misses an opportunity to lean on the left’s own optical bugaboos to achieve his triangulation against those nationalists.

Many libertarian-leaning conservatives a week prior to Charlottesville suddenly find nothing objectionable about communist revolutionaries tearing down any American iconography they can get their hands on and proclaiming that America is about anything but “ourselves and our posterity.” They compare the leftist thugs to our grandfathers who fought in the Second World War.

What’s actually happened is that Breitbart is now the nation’s largest and most trusted conservative platform and while it’s certainly not White Nationalist, it’s steadily counter-signaling antifa, supporting the monuments, and holding Trump accountable on his immigration policy rather than blind cheerleading. What’s actually happening is precisely the polarization our movement wants and needs, with the AltLite who didn’t even participate in Charlottesville completely shellshocked and immobilized while the AltRight marches forward in the development of AltTech to surmount the new problems.

Within a couple weeks of Charlottesville, we reinforced all of our online systems with Dark Web portals and debuted a new Fash Emporium shop (inventory still in progress) which also exists on the Dark Web and only accepts Bitcoin. Daily Stormer is recovering its audience and momentum from The Shuttening as well, and our movement will be more robust and antifragile when it’s all said and done. That’s what a forward-moving revolution looks like, with the system chasing us around trying to “shut it down” and our side iteratively fighting and winning those battles.

This central progressive coalition is good at, and has no qualms about, using the police and antifa to start riots that can be spun in a direction favorable to them and exploiting a news cycle to push their agenda in a semi-coordinated way behind the scenes. This is why the protest went horribly wrong, and how a lot of the subsequent reaction was coordinated; they made it happen because it was within their power. And it benefited them.

Charlottesville didn’t go according to the system’s script, at all. You don’t have helicopters randomly falling out of the sky and the mayor getting chased out of his city hall meetings by his own goons when things go well. Amateurs at the state and local level screwed up by trying to get clever and stage a bum fight they assumed was weighted in favor of their antifa allies. At the federal level, there’s more of an understanding that nationalists are best handled by maintaining order and avoiding opportunities for escalation and radicalization on either side. Pikeville received little follow-up press and less vilification (despite featuring a greater share of us gross people), because the state succeeded in maintaining order.

The alt-right bought civics class lies about free political expression, about peaceful protest being possible, let alone effective, and about it being possible for an underdog to take on the agenda of power and win, just by being dedicated and right.

You actually can win by being dedicated and right. In fact, the truth and the fact that the state can no longer effectively censor it is what guarantees our eventual victory if we can succeed in managing the escalation. But we’re going to receive a condescending lesson about why we need to be clever, manipulative, and …persuasive, in order to win. It’s not about being naive about the state’s commitment to classical liberalism but the opposite. Events like Charlottesville and others expose these contradictions to the public and teach them that there really isn’t a safe classically liberal middle anymore: only fascists and globalists.

These things only cause you to lose and create chaos, harming your cause and your society, and embarrassing your allies. Where they sometimes appear to work, it’s either some related tactic working in spite of these anti-tactics, or it’s part of the usual charade involving elite cover.

This event in particular provides a much starker illustration of the nature of political power in modern America, bringing us to the true core of good strategy, which unlike civics-class activism, might actually work: understanding the power calculus and the dynamics of elite patronage.

Buckle up for some bullshit about how we need to suck up to rich people. Even though illiterate tent dwellers who can barely afford their goats can routinely defeat the trillion dollar military machine overseas, Trump basically didn’t even finance his successful grassroots campaign, and the current altright has grown as powerful as it is while Rebel Media and other well-funded projects are imploding left and right, we’re to believe political power is something that can only be purchased. We’re to believe that we need to detect the plate tectonics of money power and find the appropriate fault line of big money to align with.

It’s generally not possible to achieve controversial political results without backing from some elite power.

The Atlanticist elites have fewer and fewer friends by the day, and even within this guy’s own framework, our best hope for achieving elite support is by proving useful as agents of social chaos and disorder.

The strategic approach the alt-right took in Charlottesville, which to be fair to them is the mainstream theory of politics advanced by modern society, is the view of politics as conflict, especially through symbolic activism. To accomplish political ends, you are supposed to go out and protest and “fight” for your marginalized group. If you “fight” well, you get some slice of favor from the system and are allowed to flourish.

Was any leadership or thinking person there under the impression that we were going to win favors or concessions from the system by winning? I can’t speak for everybody there, but our strategy here at TradWorker is to qualify ourselves as the most credible, courageous, and disciplined voice for the alienated white males who are being radicalized by the system, not by ourselves. The only marketing we vitally need at this stage is qualifying ourselves to radicalized young white men, who are increasing in number with each outrage, betrayal, and humiliation by this system.

The first rule of conflict is that you don’t pick direct fights with players who are bigger than you and have more allies in the fight. The alt-right directly challenged the system, which by definition has the most allies, and predictably lost.

This guy’s definition of “lost” is that we had some of our web services pulled and South Park gave us a hard time. By my definition, we won. We confirmed that our movement is capable of occupying public space despite the left. We confirmed that without the state to drive us out, we would have held our ground. This is basic psychology and we can’t merely opt out of qualifying ourselves as a movement capable of securing its public voice. We cannot allow men like Mr. Perilloux to talk us into remaining a virtual phenomenon too paralyzed by optical and stylistic concerns to unify and secure our public voices.

Note that a huge part of the above is the requirement to get a coalition of elite allies to back the plan. The elite backing of successful movements is like a political version of a venture-capital investment deal: the patrons loan political capital to a movement in expectation of some political return.

We qualify to potential “elite allies” by demonstrating our potential for disruption. If you’re trying to qualify yourself to elites whose priority is maintaining the current order, then you’re using the wrong end of the wedge. Both domestically and internationally, even Michael openly admits the powerful elites abroad were smiling and clapping about what happened in Charlottesville. The great thing about it all is that there’s really little need for cleverness, courtship, or compromise, since translating White Anxiety into a disruptive wildcard in American politics is exactly what our most likely benefactors want, it’s exactly the simple and honest path forward, and it’s exactly what happened in Charlottesville.

And this is the foundation of our alternative politics of collaboration instead of conflict: power is a business like any other, with investors and entrepreneurs and deals, just a bit more dangerous and messy.

Marketing. Business. Investment. Money. Capital. Blah blah blah. Could it be more obvious who’s talking? This man’s angry that Charlottesville wasn’t a successful for the masonic paleocon faction which would like to see the altright become a sort of fashy Tea Party aligned with the Republican ideals of traditional American conservatism. He wants us to try to win over wealthy conservative donors, …with waving American flags and sparkling optics and minimal confrontation or disruption.

For men of this reactionary conservative persuasion, Charlottesville most certainly was a blackpilling setback. Good.

A focus on confrontation, which produces chaos, drives away and distracts the intellectuals and networkers and strategists and organizers needed to put together a real value proposition, sell it to potential allies, and keep the movement out of fights and on track towards victory.

Anybody who finds this essay persuasive has no place in our organization. The last thing we want are intellectuals who are “driven away” by street conflict. The last thing we want are conniving masonic “networkers” and self-styled “strategists” who are willing to promote every strategy in the world except for simple struggle and honest and direct messaging. This system isn’t nearly as strong, unified, or clever as is imagined, and it’s not even capable of keeping a consistent focus on us given its myriad faults and cascade failures it’s attempting to manage right now.

Aside from having a couple men unfairly held behind the wire, Charlottesville was a tremendous victory. It was a culmination of the momentum which began with the successful Battle of Sacramento and led up to our decisively defeating the single greatest mob of anti-white radicals in American history in a brutal street battle. The altright is not a pathetic and faceless Internet fad, but a fearsome street fighting force which the state and the media now understand to be the greatest enemies. As more and more people grow disillusioned with the state and its media, we’ve positioned ourselves as its opposition in the polarity we’ve constructed, …and all without a dime of their worthless, corrupted, unwelcome paleocon elite donor money.